On workism and the hustle culture in work...

It must be vogue now to bash about the falsehood of WeWork culture in liberal media, the latest one came from The Atlantic, under the banner of workism.

A few misconceptions:

• College diploma is NOT equivalent to better educated. 
• Loving one's work and out to change the world, is NOT the same as chasing a title or climbing a career ladder or making billions of dollars, even though that's the implication a lot of people are equating them with. 
• Trying to link social media as "external trauma" of the millennials in terms of workaholism is just lame. 
• Output of white-collar work (eg. algorithms) is NOT intangible and invisible. This goes to show how little the writer knows or understands about the open-source movement which has been the rage for a very long time now.

If one can't get a paycheck that one's looking for, and if the job at least serves some higher purpose, it'll be LESS stress, not more. Think of all those lower paid work in non-profits, or social service, or nursing. Wouldn't it have made things easier if people do find some meaning in their work, rather than just looking at it as "just a job" and a paycheck? why does the writer have to argue that this is a no-win situation in which everybody loses and should feel miserable about it?

In the end, the writer repudiates himself and all of his "arguments," saying only that "extreme success" is bad, obsessing oneself with sharing one's success on social media is bad, but everything else (the so-called workism) is really not a bad thing. Why? Because he's one of the practitioners.

While public policy would alleviate public's anxiety in work-life balance, government is NOT the villain in advocating work-first ethos. And, how would this change the americans' "devotion"? In fact, more family-friendly public policy would just free up more personal time to devote to work.

Ultimately, it's really a personal choice. If you enjoy work and you happen to be very good at it, and earn gobs of money in the process, all the power to you. But if you simply suck, and you can't find anything that you like to do or are good at, then you'll just be miserable, no matter if you're a "workist" or not.